 The term Waterspider or water beetle (mizusumashi in Japanese) comes from the behavior of the insect known in the States as a whirligig, an aquatic animal that skitters around on the top of a pond quickly changing direction as it goes. For a lean enterprise the role of material handlers, expediters, and support staff changes. In the Toyota Production System this is the common name for a person assigned to support a production operation, so that others may focus exclusively on value-added work. The waterspider delivers parts to the other associates in the cell or on the line so that they don’t need to stop to replenish their work stations.
Unlike a ‘floater’, a waterspider is assigned specific tasks, such as replenishing raw material inventories (via milk run), common area clean-up, communicate status, maintain visual metrics, etc… Waterspider duties usually don’t include tasks which take them away from the production area, or detract from their specific, assigned duties (the waterspider is not the ’5S’ person or a ‘fill in’). Think of the waterspider as the ‘race car pit crew’ for the production team, without which it would be impossible to win or even run the race. Waterspiders quickly become experts in the withdrawal and production kanban system. They can ‘see’ more of the up and down stream flow in real time than most others, and because of this often making it possible to identify and eliminate errors. From recent experience the waterspiders often have a better grip on reality than their managers, planners, and engineers. Non manufacturing examples abound in restaurants, hospitals, insurance claims processing; serving the folks that add the value isn’t just for manufacturing. In product and software development the role of the program manager is sometimes something like that of the waterspider, except bringing knowledge to the various development team members instead of parts. Here are a few references: Have any examples you’d like to share?
Kanban is a system that supports level production by helping maintain stable supply and efficient operations. The question of how many kanban are needed is at the core of designing and running a kanban system. If your business process performs mostly standard, repeated operations the number of kanban can be calculated as follows:
Number of kanban = (Daily Demand * (Replenishment Time + Safety Margin))/Standard Container Quantity
Standard Container Quantity = (Daily Demand * (Replenishment Time + Safety Margin))/Number of Kanban Rule of thumb: try to keep the number of kanban between 2 and 10 by adjusting the size of the kanban container.
Many engineers and black belts will immediately jump on a computer and start picking icons and naming data elements perhaps out of habit, maybe confusing quantitative tools with qualitative. VSM is good for describing what we are going to do to affect the numbers we collect. Building databases, multiple future state scenarios, or heaven forbid monthly performance metrics perhaps misses the point of being able to visualize the “what”. All too often folks will get so mesmerized by the technology they loses sight of the group dynamic of discussing the process they are meant to be studying. Don’t waste your time and money fiddling with a new software application. Just get the right people together physically or virtually, and with some paper, pencils, markers, and sticky notes start sketching and talking. Save the computer for later.
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